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>> Here's why I think you'd be crazy to not give out your software for free. Of course, this is given that you've followed the other conditions that we've just mentioned. But first, lower friction means faster traction, right. So if you can bring down the wall to deliver or acquire your customer or for your customer to require you, then you can hook them really, really early and really easily. So the great thing with a service like box.net, or Xobni or some of these other technologies is that when you're using the service, you're actually contributing a lot of data to the service, which means that you now have a better relationship with that product and it's much stickier. So if you think about from a capitalistic standpoint, why wouldn't Box make that easy as possible to do in the first part of the process? And one of those barriers is a credit card and one of those barriers is thinking about, what is the value I'm going to get. I'd rather prove to you the value that I'm going to be able to deliver to you as a customer, rather than you having to get convinced by some sort of marketing language. So hook them super early and get their data, and then they'll be much more convinced to continue using it. You also get higher marketing leverage, right So your users become your marketers. You get -- instantly you have millions of evangelists of your product, and that's super powerful. So you no longer have to spend lots of money on fancy advertising or billboards. You can actually put your product together and have them share the service yourself. We do have a billboard, by the way, if you don't get that joke, but that's fine. So the idea is again, make your users your marketers and make sure that they're able to deliver your product for you, and you'll get an extremely high amount of leverage. So the majority of all of our enterprise customers that come in to Box start out as end users of the service. So it's really working, and it means that people can spread your product for you. It also forces you to make a much, much better product. So if you think about things from a product philosophy, this is a really important aspect of the free end model. You can no longer go and sell into an organization with really fancy marketing or really fancy sales. Because you're giving them -- you're much more transparent -- you're giving them the product right up front and you're saying, this is what we do. If you like us, then you can pay for more of it. But no one's going to pay you more for a product that they don't like. So you're really saying that, we trust our product and we trust that our users are going to want to pay for it. So it forces you to make a better product. You can no longer sell, like the old days of Oracle and go into an organization and have a vapor product for the first year or whatever. It has to be able to deliver value right away. And sales will love you for it. So your sales organization will absolutely love the fact that they have users calling you. So instead of taking 100 prospects and calling them and converting two or three or them at a wildly inefficient rate, you now have customers calling you. So this is much more effective now to build this inside sales organization that is only talking to qualified users of your product. And that's really, really powerful, and it means that you can grow really efficiently and you can understand the metrics around your business a lot faster. And it means that people are super excited to actually talk to sales, which is really important. And it also means you can reach traditionally impenetrable markets, right. So a lot of times we think about small businesses as being hard to reach, because they're sort of disconnected. They're disparately organized geographically. They don't have traditional conventions in ways that they acquired technology, so they're really hard to have access to. But the great thing with Freemium is that they actually come to us, and the product actually spreads within their own ecosystem. So we're able to reach them much faster. The same thing for enterprise software, right. We wouldn't be able to build out the right kind of sales organization to reach enterprises at the scale we're at, but instead what happens is you have the users spreading the product for you, which enables us to get into new markets and new industries that we would have never had time to have. So again, it's all about listening to your customers and making sure you're paying attention to when you've actually appeared in the new industry, which is really important as you develop the product and what you want to be doing. And if they don't want to pay, they don't have to leave. And this is actually the most exciting part about the Freemium model to me. So instead of having a customer sign up for a free trial of your product and you getting a 20% conversion rate on that free trial, and then they have to leave if they don't pay you, you actually get to keep all of your customers, which is really awesome. There will always be segments of customers that can't afford your product. It's not the right time for them to buy it. They might want to pay you later, but they might not have budget for it now. So why not keep them in your ecosystem while they don't have the right kind of value or aren't seeing the right kind of ROI on your technology. And that's really important to Freemium, is you're able to acquire these customers and you're able to keep them on your network and on your service and not going over to another service if they're not willing to pay. And hopefully you'll be able to convert them later, but if not, then they become a marketer for you. So that's really, really important.
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